USA dominates

Most of the top websites stem from operations based in the US. The majority of the listed sites are written from that country. The following facts may contribute: the USA are still the country the most present on the Web, they still dominate the English-speaking culture and they are on a trend to become the top wine drinking country in the world.

Foreigners

So here is a list of all the websites which are pure players (without offline operations), in the Top 140 and not based in an English-speaking nation:

A comprehensive pool of candidates

The number of websites that I retrieve metrics for is 500. This list is close to being complete: it includes almost all the websites that qualify.

The small against the big

I chose to not include magazines, that is sites that are written by many contributors. Press and firms have their means of getting known. I’d rather promote unique voices (blogs). So the top food blogs is a convenient tool for getting to know prominent culinary authors. Please tell me if you spot an item in the list that would have more than 2 contributors.

How to participate

Websites are automatically included in the contest as soon as I learn of their existence. To be eligible to the next issue of the Top food blogs, the below conditions must be met:

The main topic should be food.

The articles must be written by one or two persons (not a team) — so as to screen firms.

Web hosting

Your website will be accessed from anywhere on the Internet but it actually will reside somewhere: in a computer connected to the Internet. This step is described in the recipe to cook a deft website.

Set-up the website

Open an account at the hosting company. Download an FTP client.
Choose files to wrap up the PHP script. An option is a simple file named index.php. It would start with a few HTML lines.
Another option is to consider a CMS (content management system). You will interact with this software to manage your website. Wordpress is an excellent CMS in that it is both engaging and tremendously enabling.
In your FTP client upload your PHP file or the Wordpress files.

API key

Search engine PHP script

This PHP script will take a query and gather search engine results. You can change the way these results are displayed. If you learn some PHP you can even transform the results (or recombine them).
What the PHP script does:

display a form where the user will enter her query;

capture the query (named $secure_query);

call Yahoo BOSS;

receive and process the Yahoo BOSS results;

display the results.

How to copy it

This PHP script can be placed in any file named something.php. It can notably be inserted into a PHP blog platform. I would advise you to consider Wordpress which is one of the best blog engines and whose license is the same.

I am progressing. Thanks to the feedback of some fellow bloggers I have come to realize that the directory of wine sites is not so much about quality as it is about popularity. It shows the big names because it is based on Google and traffic. This certainly is useful to have a view of who is important in the wine domain.

I will publish something similar for the food business. It will show the 100 most popular food blogs. So come back here in June.

I am already working on this project. This gives me a view of the food blogging field and enables me to spot interesting authors. I read them and incorporate some of them into the food engine. Cellarer is a search engine with a bias: it prefers lesser-known authors over big firms. Type any food-related query into the top box and you will obtain custom answers: from niche experts.
Cellarer search is about quality related to the niche — which is food, cooking and wine. It takes you to a tour of interesting bloggers.